by Kage Baker
“Easy, come on, take it easy,” said Juan; and at his voice the bird calmed and turned its big rocket-shaped head to watch us.
“What do you have there?” Einar asked, crouching down to stare at it.
“Pelecanus occidental,” Juan said. “Brown pelican. Old female. She’s hurt. Look, I think that’s fishing net cutting into her leg—I think her leg’s broken—can you see? Can you get her leg free?”
“Sssh, ssh, let’s see.” Einar stretched out a careful hand. “You won’t stab me, old lady, will you? No, you won’t. Okay, that’s fishing net, all right. I can try and cut it loose, but you’ll have to hold her bill so she doesn’t take a whack at me with it, okay, J. B.?”
“Okay,” said Juan, his voice trembling.
I turned and walked away. I couldn’t watch. It seemed to me the poor bird would have to be killed. I was profoundly grateful I was a botanist and free from the attachments people in other disciplines formed with the creatures they studied. Not that I didn’t love plants. I walked up and down, looking out at the horizon where a couple of ships lay at anchor. I looked east, where Dead Man’s Island raised its cone of mud. I looked at the ramshackle adobes and fishing boats beached at the old landing. I looked at the squared spaces where the new Union Army headquarters was being built, to save us all from joining a Confederacy in a distant and unreal world.
When I dared to look back, Einar was putting his knife away and talking in a soothing tone. “See how easy that was? Didn’t hardly hurt the old lady at all. It’s not a bad break, but it is broken, J. B. You need to make a decision now.”
“We can’t kill her!” the boy said in panic. “She’s a brown pelican. They’ll become endangered.”
“I know. Okay, look. I can splint her leg now, and you can put it in a cast when you get her home, but what will happen then? How are you going to feed her? She eats fish, you know.”
“There’s trout in the stream,” said Juan. “And I can give her food supplements, like I do with Erich. Please, Einar.”
Einar was shaking his head, but he got a piece of driftwood and fashioned a splint for the bird’s leg, cutting strands from the net to bind the leg securely.
I ventured close. “You have to remember, Juanito, she’s an old bird,” I felt obliged to say. “Even if this doesn’t work, you’ve made what little time she has left more comfortable. So you mustn’t feel bad if she doesn’t make it. This happens to mortal things. Nature will make more of them.”
“Not that many of these,” he said, and I couldn’t argue with that, so I kept my other helpful remarks to myself.
We took her with us, across the sloughs to the wagon, and Juan Bautista climbed into the back with her and wrapped her in his towel so she’d feel more secure during the long rattling drive home. By the time we reached La Nopalera that evening, she was still alive, and he’d named her Marie Dressier.
At about the point where we passed the future Hollywood Bowl, we began to hear something, and it wasn’t Symphonies under the Stars. “What is that?” I asked.
Juan Bautista, dozing in the back with his arms around Marie, sat up guiltily.
“That’s Erich,” he said.
“Uh-oh,” said Einar, and uh-oh was right. When we finally came creaking up our canyon trail to the inn, the screams were sounding out once every two seconds and Porfirio was sitting out by the cook-fire, his hands over his ears.
Einar set the hand brake and jumped down. “Bird’s upset, I guess.”
“When did he start?” asked Juan Bautista, clambering out awkwardly, his arms full of Marie.
“Start? He never stopped,” replied Porfirio through his teeth. “Not for ten seconds since you’ve been gone, muchacho. Please go in there right now and shut him up, okay?”
“Okay,” said Juan Bautista, and ran for his room. As soon as he had gone inside and lit his lamp, the screams were replaced by happy little croodling sounds and a couple of dinosaur noises.
Porfirio’s head sank to his knees. “Finally,” he groaned. “Finally.” Then he sat bolt upright. “Did he have another damn bird with him?”
“Another endangered rarity, chief,” Einar said, getting the horses out of harness. “Just doing his job. California brown pelican with a busted leg. No big deal.”
“We picked up some freight, too.” I hastened to bring the box of periodicals. “Looks like you got your latest issue of Punch.”
“How nice for me.” Porfirio took the box with trembling hands. “Well, I think I’ll go to bed now. I think I’ll lie in bed and just read for a while. There’s plenty to eat—Imarte and Oscar decided to dine out this evening. Help yourselves. Bye.”
He got up and walked away, stiff-legged with controlled violence. I stared after him in frank admiration. I’d have wrung the bird’s neck after the first hour.
PORFIRIO EMERGED from his room looking rested next morning, as I was trying to figure out how much coffee to make.
“Eight scoops or six?” I asked, fumbling with the coffeepot.
He rolled his eyes and took the pot from me. “Here, let me. Will you do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
“Go wake up Juan Bautista and tell him I want to talk to him.”
I went to knock on Juan Bautista’s door. Nobody answered, so after a moment I entered.
It smelled like birds in there, and no wonder; one whole wall was cages, in which several dozen little nondescript-looking birds hopped and twittered. There were a couple of big cages, and in one of them Marie Dressier was enthroned, staring at me dolefully. Her broken leg, fixed in a cast, stuck out at an awkward angle. There was also a large perch next to the bed, clearly Erich von Stroheim’s night roost. All the cages were spotlessly clean, the perch too, and all the water cups were full of fresh water and all the food cups full of fresh food. But the bed was an unmade wreck, and anything that was Juan’s was either lying in a heap on the floor or piled on his one chair. He might have been an immortal cyborg like the rest of us, but he was also a seventeen-year-old boy.
As I was reflecting on this, the door opened behind me and he came in. Erich von Stroheim was perched on both his shoulders, straddling his head like a bizarre hat. Juan Bautista was carrying a little trout in either hand.
“Oh. Hello,” he said, and stepped past me to open Marie Dressler’s cage. “Here’s your fish, lady. Just caught, see? Look, breakfast!” She looked at him as though he were crazy, then tilted up her head to receive his offering. After a few tries she got them down.
“I didn’t know you kept birds in here,” I said by way of polite conversation.
“This way I know coyotes won’t get them. That’s a chaparral bunting, and those are white flickers, and this is a pink-faced parrot-let, and that’s an oak flycatcher, and that’s a rufous-chinned sparrow. There’s a little Neele’s owl in here too, but he’s hiding. All these guys will go extinct in the next fifty years. Except not really, because I’ve saved them.” There was quiet pride in his voice. I remembered the first time I found and saved a rarity, how excited I’d been. Ilex tormentosum, the last known specimen, growing in a garden in England.
I put England out of my mind. “So, you’re shipping them off to the Company aviaries?”
“When I’ve finished studying them.” He nodded at his processing credenza, which I hadn’t noticed because his guitar was leaning against it. “Except for Erich, I guess. He’s kind of bonded to me.”
“Uh . . .that reminds me. Porfirio would like to speak with you.”
“Oh,” he said, and slunk out of the room. I followed, not that I wanted a seat at his dressing-down, but I really needed some coffee.
The coffee wasn’t ready yet when I came to the cookfire where Juan was facing Porfirio, head lowered meekly. I kept walking past them, deciding to disappear into the oak trees for a while, but I could still hear their conversation.
“Okay, before you say anything, I just want you to know that I understand it was really irresponsible of me to go off and leave
Erich like that, and I’m really sorry he screamed all the time I was gone, and I hope it didn’t bother the other operatives too much, and I promise it’ll never happen again,” recited Juan Bautista. He drew a deep breath.
Porfirio rubbed his unshaven chin. “You’re never going swimming again, huh?”
“Well . . .”
“Never going to leave the bird alone for the night while you go out anywhere? Never going to go on field trips without him? How many endangered songbirds are you likely to catch with a condor perching on your head, kid?”
“Well . . .”
“Sit down, Juanito. We need to discuss your problem. It’s not really that big a problem, as they go, but you need to understand a few things about life in the field.”
“I thought I was doing a good job,” said Juan, sounding stricken.
“You are. But you’re going to be real unhappy, soon, and that’s bad. It’s especially bad for an immortal. We immortals need to avoid unhappiness at all costs, and do you know why? Because it’s the only thing that can hurt us. Nothing else can get inside us and screw us up, not germs, not bullets, not poison—only unhappiness. And you can’t do a good job when you’re unhappy.”
“Why am I going to be unhappy?”
Shit, the kid was so young.
“Because you have a pet. We don’t have pets, Juan. Pets require time we haven’t got, because we’re operatives and all our time belongs to the Company. Pets require special housing and stuff we can’t give them, because we never know when the Company is going to transfer us somewhere at a moment’s notice. Pets require constant attention and love, and we can’t afford to love them, because they’re mortal and they’ll die, which will make us unhappy, which will interfere with our doing a good job for the Company.
“See? Now, once in a while you people whose specialty is living things—ornithologists like you, or zoologists like Einar—will feel friendly toward something you’ve rescued. That’s okay. Having friends is okay. Friends come and go, and it doesn’t hurt much. But there’s a different relationship involved here.”
“Your problem is that this bird isn’t a canary in a cage. It’s a big, intelligent animal, and unfortunately its instinct is for complex social relations. It has bonded with you. That’s bad, Juan, because when the time comes for you to go your way on your next mission, what do you do with Erich? You can’t turn him loose. He doesn’t know how to hunt. He doesn’t know to be afraid of people. Access the whole history of the attempts to save his kind from extinction. Look at the problems condors have.”
“I know.”
“The only thing you’re going to be able to do is ship him off with the rest of your collected specimens, because that’s all he is: a specimen. That’s all he can be to you. But it’s going to hurt both of you, because he hasn’t been a specimen, he’s been your pet, your baby. You see what I’m saying here?”
“You’re saying we shouldn’t love the things we save from destruction.” Juan’s voice was muffled. He was crying. There was a long silence before Porfirio answered.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s it, pretty much.”
“I think it’s crappy!”
“Yeah.” Another long pause. “But it’s the way things are.”
A moment later, Porfirio continued: “This is not to say you can’t love anything. Stuff that lasts forever, like your work or literature or cinema, that’s safe. Look how happy Einar is. And look at those friends of Mendoza’s who stayed here, they were actually in love with each other! Mortals, though . . . you want to avoid that. That can seriously screw you up. That’ll make your present heartache look like a picnic. You just ask—” His voice broke off abruptly. I clenched my fists.
“So what do you want me to do?” Juan Bautista sniffed.
“No more pets. And start weaning yourself emotionally from the one you’ve got, all right? Better for you, better for him. Think how happy he’ll be in the Company aviary. Once he has a mate, he’ll forget all about you, and that’s the way it should be.”
“What about Marie?”
“She’s a specimen. Once her leg has healed, she’s off to the Company.”
I put my face in my hands. Poor boy. I’d heard all this before, of course. Señors, when those clever twenty-fourth-century mortals devised us, they devised badly. Our fragile mortal bones are replaced with unbreakable ferroceramic; our weak mortal sinews are laced through with indestructible fiber, proof against any wrenching blow. Why not excise the wretched mortal heart too, give us a clean pump of steel, nothing that can weep at the appalling passage of the years? As I was weeping now, for the man I’d been unable to save.
I felt a hand touch my shoulder. But when I turned, there was nothing there but California, all sagebrush and red sand. What, was he going to start tormenting me in broad daylight? What had set him off now, the fact that it was an Englishman buried on Dead Man’s Island? Was I never going to be free of England and dead Englishmen?
I ran down to the mouth of the canyon and out onto El Camino Real. I looked northward in longing for the forests of the coastal range. The road was free: it ran past me and kept going, skirting the dry hills, veering over to the coast, going on and on until it ended at what would one day be the Hyde Street Pier in San Francisco. If I stood there now, what cooler air I’d be breathing, what greener hills I’d see, and what a sound of the sea would be roaring in my ears!
As I stood there wishing myself anywhere but this flat-topped, sun-baked, bullet-ridden place, I picked up the approach of a mortal man, riding in from the city to the south. I scanned and dismissed him. It was the Yankee fellow who had come out to see Imarte, presumably back for another romantic interlude. To my dismay, he turned his horse’s head in my direction and looked at me hopefully.
“Good morning, ma’am,” he called out to me.
“Buenos días, señor,” I said. Maybe if he thought I didn’t speak English, he’d ride on.
“Ain’t you the gal that works at the stagecoach stop, up there?” He pointed. “You know if Miss Marthy’s at home to callers today?”
“No, señor, she is away,” I said. “She is expected to arrive on the next stage, however.”
“I reckon I’ll wait for her, then,” he said, but to my annoyance he continued to sit there on his horse and stare at me. “Uh . . .señorita? You know Miss Marthy very well?”
“Reasonably well, señor.” What was this about? Had he caught something? It couldn’t be from Imarte, not with the arsenal of amplified antibodies and God knew what else we Immortals carried in our systems.
“Well, would you know . . .? I’d like to get her something, something grand like what she ain’t never had, but I don’t know the lady’s taste. She’s got all them books in her room, and it’s clear to me she ain’t the common trashy kind of girl, you see what I’m saying? I never seen a lady so cultivated and refined that was so beautiful too, all on top of earning her living as she does. You reckon she’d like a Shakespeare book?” His eyes were big and pleading.
Oh, dear, the mortal fool was falling in love with Imarte. Twice as stupid as falling in love with an ordinary whore.
“I think, señor, that her tastes do not run to literature,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “I think she likes history better. I know she enjoys the company of men who have lived interesting lives.”
“Oh, I seen that right away,” he said, leaning forward in the saddle. “She thought no end of the stories I had to tell her about me tellin’ off General Vallejo. Real interested in what I did in Nicaragua. Seems to me she don’t come by her profession from natural inclination, wouldn’t you think, señorita?”
“Probably not,” I agreed, and even if I disagreed, he’d hear what he wanted to hear. “But you know how difficult it is for a lady to make a living in these parts, señor.”
“Why, sure,” he said. “Poor beautiful thing, to be down on her luck the way she is. You can tell she weren’t born to it. Why, by rights she ought to have servants waitin
g on her. . . . You know what she reminds me of? There was this storybook my Uncle Jack had when I was a kid. He used to read from it, all about this beautiful queen whose husband thought women were no good and he’d marry a new one every night and have her killed with a sword every morning. Only this queen kept her wits about her and told him a great big old story every night, and he let her live till next evening so’s he could hear how it come out, only she kept the story going so he never did hear the end, and after three years he decided the hell with it and kept her. That’s kind of what it’s like seeing Miss Marthy.” He sighed. “Except I’m the one doing all the talking.”
“She enjoys tales of adventure, señor, especially if they’re true,” I said, in no mood to have a mortal pour out his heart to me.
“I been thinking I could tell her about when I was up in Frisco last year,” he said. “Hell of a joke. Bunch of fellows up there had a plan going to sell out California to the secessionists. Young fellow went by the name of Asbury Harpending (and ain’t that the worst silly-ass name you ever hear?) was trying to raise him an army. I nearly joined, too. Reckon Miss Marthy would like that?”
“It sounds fascinating, señor,” I said. “But, is that not the stagecoach? Perhaps even now your beloved is speeding like the wind to your embrace.”
He gulped and turned in the saddle, and thank God it was true: here came the northbound stage, throwing out a wake of dust cloud like a malevolent djinn. The Scheherazade of Cahuenga Pass had returned.
“Thanks for the talk, señorita,” called the Yankee over his shoulder, and galloped away to be there when she dismounted. I hope she hadn’t brought a customer home or there was likely to be lead flying under the oak trees.
No shots rang out, however, and after a while I sneaked back and managed to get my field kit and vanish into the bushes for a while, all by myself for a change.
